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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25242943">Look Up at the Stars</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/G_J_Smith/pseuds/G_J_Smith'>G_J_Smith</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Wolf 359 (Radio)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, F/F, Gen, Maxwell's Backstory, Maxwell's Reflexive Disdain for the state of Montana, Missing Scene, Post-Canon, Referenced Trauma from Canon Violence, Standard Astronaut Job Interview Questions, Stargazing, referenced canon violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 05:09:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,025</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25242943</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/G_J_Smith/pseuds/G_J_Smith</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"What made you want to go to space?"</p><p>Rachel reviews candidates for the Hephaestus mission. Lovelace and Minkowski take some time off. Maxwell takes a moment to talk to a new co-worker. </p><p>Originally written for Tuesday of Podcast Girls Week 2020 and the prompt "Past/Future", but was split into multiple chapters to also cover Wednesday's prompt (F/F) and a little bit of Thursday (AU) after it was clear it'd be posted late.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Alana Maxwell &amp; Rachel Young, Isabel Lovelace &amp; Renée Minkowski, Rachel Young &amp; Isabel Lovelace, Rachel Young &amp; Renée Minkowski</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Podcast Girls Week</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Before the Beginning and after the End</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I write slow and other projects kept me from being able to do much work in advance for Podcast Girls Week. :x So while I'll get around to the other pieces I'd intended for the week, I wanted to put up <i>something</i> after I posted my <a href="https://twitter.com/eeveeEnthusiast/status/1280240267111661568?s=20">Bolero piece</a> <a href="https://geejaysmith.tumblr.com/post/622925882225573888/awwww-yis-podcastgirlsweek-day-one-monday">on Monday</a> and abruptly vanished. So now you get multiple pieces from me for certain days, yaaaay. </p><p>Chapter 1 is retroactively assigned to Tuesday (Past/Future), but as the whole fic was intended for a single day, the divisions are not hard and fast rules.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b> <em>Goddard Futuristics HQ, Cape Canaveral, January 2013</em> </b>
</p>
<p>"What made you want to go to space?"</p>
<p>The question wasn't an unexpected one. It came up in interviews for all your aspiring astronauts, because it was useful for both building a personality applicant and inquiring into your applicant's motive - as well as fine-tuning their psychological pressure points, for the ones Goddard Futuristics took on. Lt. Minkowski had clearly anticipated this, and had rehearsed her answer accordingly; "After years of monitoring the skies on Earth, I want to use those skills in deep space to push the boundaries of scientific understanding of the universe, and mankind's place in it."</p>
<p>Rachel paused the interview footage to make a note, her other hand flipped idly through the stack of papers beside her laptop, as she suppressed the reflex to roll her eyes. Not that rehearsed was necessarily a <em>bad</em> thing - rehearsed meant prepared. Rehearsed meant Renée Minkowski was serious, diligent, and most importantly, completely by the book. And just because Minkowski had memorized her answer didn't mean she didn't mean it. You could see it in the set of her shoulders, the way she never relaxed, the way one foot started tapping where she thought the interviewer couldn't see it - but the room’s hidden camera could.</p>
<p>She wasn't that artful at the dance. Not to the eyes of a seasoned performer.</p>
<p>No, the real answer was there, if you knew how to look. You only had to know the story behind the name <em>Andrei Minkowski</em>. Then you checked his daughter’s OPR reports and saw all the “lots of potential”s and “continue to challenge”’s peppering the four years in a row she’d been passed over for promotion to captain, even after competently commanding a small squadron (one that hadn’t actually had much to do besides training missions in years). And then there were the rejection letters from NASA and the stage musical writing programs... You could see why Minkowski was so guarded. So anxious to get the job. What was a girl to do when the world denied her the opportunity to be important? Get a few light-years away from where any of that mattered - if you weren’t daring enough to invent your own way around barriers to begin with, of course.</p>
<p>To Rachel's eyes, Minkowski was an open book that desperate to be read. Skilled enough to vault over any hurdle you set up for her, but who would then flail and fall apart when the solution wasn’t in the manual. Rachel rewound the video by a few seconds and hit play, listening to Minkowski's clipped answers while jotting down a few recommendations in her file for if they were to approach her with an offer. If Minkowski hadn't thought that far ahead, or if she was just that desperate to get off-planet - and they often were, even if they didn't realize it - she'd probably look past a lot of red flags. That, and it'd be interesting to see how Minkowski dealt with things she didn't expect. The last person they'd put in charge of the Hephaestus had been a little too good at that, and now Mr. Cutter was looking to try the opposite approach. Even though, if you were going to go to the time and energy of assembling a deep space crew in the first place, you’d <em>think</em> you’d want them to last as long as possible, get all the data out of them you could, even if you were just going to flush them down the star’s gravity well in the end like all the-</p>
<p>Rachel paused the video again to cut off the irritating staccato rhythm of Minkowski’s interview, then, after some thought, closed the player - she'd seen enough, and together with HR's recommendations, it gave them plenty to go off of. She had already pitched her argument to Cutter, and he had already made his mind up, and as infuriating as it was, Rachel would admit there was a logic to it. It was simple cost-benefit analysis: since they planned for this crew to be expendable right from launch, why send up more valuable assets? Why go to the trouble if what you got out of the first crew wasn’t that promising to begin with? Even if it could have been a lot better, could’ve been<em> built on</em> by later missions, with a crew that could have, <em>should</em> have, lasted a lot longer than a single-</p>
<p>Bigger picture, Rachel. Everyone was playing the long game here. You played along, and you didn’t show your cards. Even if it had sucked to get one of her first big wins, the assembly of the <em>Hephaestus</em> Dream Team, washed down the Decima sinkhole that Cutter had spent a <em>truly</em> baffling amount of time and money on over the years. That was Goddard Futuristics; you danced along to Cutter's music, or you got the hell out.</p>
<p>And besides – maybe, if they were lucky, and Kepler hadn’t been talking out of his ass about that escape shuttle plummeting into the star (they had <em>improvised</em> a working escape shuttle in that rust bucket of a station. God, some days Cutter truly did act like a moron, squandering talent like that, especially when you looked at who he <em>did</em> promote) – it wouldn’t be a complete waste of potential.</p>
<p>Rachel paused in the middle of her final write-up as a thought occurred to her. <em>Why do you want to go to space?</em></p>
<p> How<em> had</em> Captain Lovelace answered that one...?</p>
<p>"I mean, for the, oh, fifteen minutes or so that it's been an option? It sounds like it'd be an <em>exciting new challenge</em> that complements my skills and experience," she had said, or something like that. Either way, it’d been almost a parody of Minkowski's performance. Maybe Rachel couldn’t quite remember it, but she could picture it. Lovelace’s questioning look at the bog-standard question, which turned to a knowing little smirk when Rachel told her it was a “standard question, helps build a character inventory to match you with potential crew members.” They might as well have both turned and winked at the cameras.</p>
<p>That kind of banter wouldn’t work with Minkowski, which was kind of a shame. That’d been a fun hour and a half. But if Mr. Cutter approved her hiring choice, and they got her down to headquarters, they’d still get a mission commander out of her. This round of candidates had been chosen with that as the key criteria – the ones that didn’t have a good reason to say no.</p>
<p>...had Lovelace known that they'd known? Had she seen her own stunned excitement at the surprise offer giving her away? Or had she really thought about taking one of the most dangerous, remote positions you could hire someone for just because it was more exciting than being a flight instructor?</p>
<p>Rachel mused on the idea, then shut her laptop and filed the thought away. It was a moot point; Captain Lovelace was gone now. But she'd be sure to make a note of it, just in case they ended up having to do any future performance evaluations.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Stargaze</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Chapter 2 is retroactively assigned to Wednesday of Podcast Girls Week (F/F), but as the whole fic was intended for a single day, the divisions are not hard and fast rules. </p>
<p>Also, Minlace is tagged with both a "/" and a "&amp;" because as I was writing it (jokes about date ideas aside) it felt right to keep the present nature of their relationship purposefully open-ended. Girlfriends? QPs? Moirails, if that's a word you're brave enough to use in mixed company? Something they don't label? Do as you will, the point is they love each other because the whole crew is a fire-forged found family and always will be.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>
    <em>Outside Colorado Springs, near Pikes Peak, May 2018</em>
  </b>
</p>
<p>As the photons that saw the early days of Captain Lovelace's mission found their way to Earth, about 8 years and 46 trillion miles after those idyllic first 200 days, a different Lovelace and a different Minkowski went on a hiking trip.</p>
<p>The rest of the crew - though the way Renée now used the word made it feel more like "family" - had been anxious about it. And that was natural, between the combined factors of the distance and the wild destination, but they weren't straying that far from civilization - not that anywhere felt that far from civilization now. And besides; Minkowski knew this place. Between her cadet days and her time as a flight instructor, she must've been out on this exact trail over a dozen times in the past two decades. And she'd had plenty of time to find good stargazing spots.</p>
<p>Their camp was pitched at the edge of clearing, a ways off the beaten trail. Close enough to the tree line to feel sheltered, but far enough that, lying back on rolled-out sleeping bags, bundled up against the chill of the mountain night, she and Lovelace weren't more than a few body lengths from the tent as they gazed up at the stars. The view was dazzling, and dizzying, an ocean of glittering specks on velvet black. You wouldn't think you could get this kind of night sky only an hour away from the nearest city. But something about having braved an infinite void of true nothing for years meant that Minkowski didn't feel the distance like she remembered. Just having trees peeking into the edge of her vision overhead, and ground beneath her, and gravity to hold her to it made her feel tethered, even as the open air nipping at her nose had her feeling small and vulnerable.</p>
<p>She heard fabric shift next to her and a hand slide into her own. She looked away from the stars and at her companion, Lovelace little more than a faint shape in the dark. "You okay?" she asked.</p>
<p>"Yeah, 'm fine." Isabel answered softly, giving her hand a little squeeze. "Just... you know."</p>
<p>It'd taken time before anyone could step into the outside world without feeling like they ought to be wearing the heavy armor of a spacesuit, like the space beyond doors was too big or too exposed or too crowded - or all three at once. Minkowski had come home with a nasty migraine the first time she'd tried making a trip to the grocery store. Even now, almost a year and a half after landing, she would still sometimes reach out for the handle of the front door, only to be hit with a sudden swoop of panic. Like she'd forgotten something vitally important.</p>
<p>Renée squeezed her hand back, glad Isabel had wanted to come along. "Yeah. I do."</p>
<p>They lapsed into quiet under the gaze of the heavens. You sometimes got a spinning sensation when you did this, like you were on a boat at sea or something other than solid ground  - maybe because something in you recognized just how far away all those little points of light were. It almost felt like floating, if you didn't know what true weightlessness felt like.</p>
<p>"Is that it?" Lovelace asked, pointing upwards and drawing a line, from the brightest star at the bottom of the sickle-shape, over to the rough triangle that, together, formed the Leo constellation. Minkowski gave the rest of the sky a cursory scan - just to be sure, there were so many other stars glittering in the dark.</p>
<p>"Looks like it. And since you've got Regulus right on the ecliptic line..." Her own hand was a silhouette against the night as she made the angles with her thumb and forefinger. Again, the shifting of fabric, and Isabel's warmth against her own, her curls tickling Renée's jaw as she put her head close to the crook of her shoulder - to better follow her vantage point, of course.</p>
<p>"It should be right... somewhere around... here."</p>
<p>There was a trio of small stars on the imaginary line beneath the constellation, but the space she pointed to was dark. They both found themselves squinting to see if they get their eyes to bring anything into focus, to pick out a fuzzy little red pinprick among millions of fuzzy little pinpricks. It only seemed to make more tiny spots of light dance and swim into view.</p>
<p>"...it is a flare star," Isabel pointed out. "Maybe we'll get lucky. Or we can just do this again once its blue phase is visible."</p>
<p>Hera had already worked out the date on that one, and marked it down in their calendars. There was a vague sense they'd offer the scientific community some explanation that they'd totally have decided on by then, and then do something to celebrate the occasion. By now, she could've drawn up a whole itinerary of when and where on the planet they'd have optimum visibility of their twice-in-a-lifetime astronomical event.</p>
<p>"You think Doug'll spring for a camping trip?" Renée asked.</p>
<p>"Who knows? We've got another five years to talk him into it."</p>
<p>"Mm." Renée shifted against Isabel, her body huddling against the other woman's, tucking her nose into her hair to ward off the chill.</p>
<p>"You alright?"</p>
<p>"'m fine, just kinda cold."</p>
<p>More quiet. The silence of the wilderness was so different from the silence of the Hephaestus, or even the silence of the house in D.C. that'd found itself a home to her crew (plus one very patient journalist and his cat). There were no engines rumbling here. No machines creaking or pipes rattling. No foundation settling. No people moving or talking or even just living, though they were surrounded by things that were living. </p>
<p>"...What made you want to go to space, Iz?" Iz. Or Izzy. Both nicknames that Eiffel had started using after they had landed and Lovelace had insisted that last names and ranks were for active deployments only. First name basis had been normal to them for months now, though she and Minkowski had taken forever to get in the habit with each other. "Captain" and "Commander" were still spoken regularly, their own strange terms of endearment.</p>
<p>Lovelace craned her neck to look at her, her eyes reflecting the night sky. Like it brought out the stardust in her. "Huh? What, do you see the mothership out there or something?"</p>
<p>"Just curious, I guess. Stargazing makes you think about these things."</p>
<p>They spoke in hushed voices, exchanged just inches apart. It made the world feel like it was just the two of them, like there was nothing beyond the edges of their sleeping bags but the wide open sky above. The faint sound of wind through leaves and the distant calls of some far off animal settled over them while Lovelace thought about her answer, like a blanket. Bounded, yet infinite. Vulnerable, yet safe.</p>
<p>"I dunno," Isabel murmured, "I got kinda shunted around my last few years in the Air Force. You know, the higher-ups making me someone else's problem rather than deal with my shit. Guess I kinda got used to dealing with wherever I was put. ...Then along comes Goddard Futuristics. I walk in thinking I'm applying to be a flight instructor, and they go, 'hey, you seem pretty cool, how'd you like to go to space?' in the middle of the job interview."</p>
<p>"Seriously?"</p>
<p>"Seriously."</p>
<p>Minkowski made an exasperated noise. "What a pack of lunatics..."</p>
<p>"Yeah, well, that's Cutter for you."</p>
<p>"So that's it then? You just packed up and took off for parts unknown?"</p>
<p>"Hey, would you have said no?"</p>
<p>"God, no... But that's because it was what I wanted to do my whole life."</p>
<p>Lovelace went quiet again, but it was the kind of quiet where Renée could feel some kind of comment coming down the line. Like she was being evaluated. But with the Captain, it didn't worry her, and she let have her thoughts.</p>
<p>"Yeah," Isabel finally said, as if capping off a conversation she'd been having inside her own head, "you seem like the type."</p>
<p>Minkowski might've asked "and what do you mean by that?" but Lovelace had said it with fondness, and the quiet was a cloak that muffled any urge to banter. But it did make her think.</p>
<p>"...they had this big file on me when I came in to interview, said I'd earned the job on my C.V. alone," she said, when the thought got too loud to stay in her head. "And yeah, obviously there would be a catch, but... I wanted to believe it. That I'd earned it, that I could make it work." </p>
<p>She said it as much to the open night sky as she did to Lovelace, and Lovelace made a soft noise of assent. "Yeah, like they're letting you in on something big, just for you. Just enough to make you go 'you know what? I deserve this.' ...and I guess... that's how they get you." </p>
<p>You never felt smaller than when you were out under the open night sky, whether you had earth beneath you or not. </p>
<p>
  <span>"And you know what...?" Isabel went on, her own confession to the night. "Until it all went to hell... it was good."</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Silence. </span>
</p>
<p>"...would you do it again, if you could do everything over?" one of them asked, small and quiet in the dark.</p>
<p>"Would you?" said the other.</p>
<p>And that was all the answer anyone needed.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The name thing started with me using "Isabel" in place of "Lovelace" once, the way it sometimes happens because that's how the words come together in my head, and suddenly I'm flipping back and forth through the entire piece for both of them based on an intuitive sense of what feels right that probably makes sense only to me. I regret nothing.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Dive</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Chapter 3 is retroactively assigned to Thursday of Podcast Girls Week (AU) , but as the whole fic was intended for a single day, the divisions are not hard and fast rules, particularly for this chapter.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>"What made you want to go to space?"</p>
<p>It was something Rachel hadn't gotten the chance to ask Dr. Maxwell. As one of Kepler's personal, mission-specific picks, SI-5 had handled the bulk of her hiring internally. And Maxwell was such an... odd fit, on the surface of things, that now Rachel found herself idly curious.</p>
<p>The question seemed to startle Maxwell out of some kind of reverie - their paths had tended to cross while she was off in her own little world, and now was no exception. She tore her eyes away from the window with a "huh?" before the alert part of her brain filled her in on what was happening around her. "...oh. You know. The allure of discovery, exploring the final frontier, pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and going where mainstream science is afraid to go." She waved a hand through a billion unseen motivational pamphlets. "All the usual 'change the world' STEM major stuff."</p>
<p>"And that was enough to make you climb aboard a highly-controlled explosion and take off for the stars?" Rachel folded her arms, leaning on the windowsill and carefully balancing to stay stationary. "Come on. Give me a real answer."</p>
<p>Maxwell tilted her head at her, keeping her cheerful smile on. She was only an odd fit on the surface, after all. "Like wanting to change the world isn't enough?"</p>
<p>"At least give me something specific,” Rachel pressed, having nothing more pressing to occupy her time than this sudden game they were playing. “The usual story we wrangle out of people is when they first knew they wanted off the planet."</p>
<p>"When I first knew, huh..." Maxwell looked back to the window and her eyes went distant again, going glassy from the glare of the starlight. "...well, how's this: when I was thirteen, I tried to get abducted by aliens."</p>
<p>"Really." Rachel didn't stop the amusement creeping into her voice - with anyone else, anywhere else, she might've been surprised, but here it was just the universe having a fucking incredible sense of humor. Assuming it was true, of course.</p>
<p>"When having a post office makes you the largest town for 40 minutes in either direction?" Maxwell said with a kind of shrug, glancing at her. "You'd do almost anything to be anywhere else."</p>
<p>"And you picked outer space."</p>
<p>"Well, I picked MIT first, but I was planning to get there. 'Til I heard the siren call of AI development and switched majors, that is."</p>
<p>"So what'd you do,” Rachel asked, humoring this suspiciously fitting little tale, “wander out into a crop circle in the middle of the night with your fingers crossed?"</p>
<p>"More like the edge of the mountains, but yeah. I'd jury-rigged this little battery-powered radio to send out signals corresponding to a sequence of prime numbers and brought the brightest flashlight we had to establish visual contact-" Maxwell waved a hand dismissively. No doubt she'd be able to, if not remember completely, then at least deduce how she planned to play air traffic control to a UFO, "you know, the kinda thing that you think is a foolproof plan when you're a kid."</p>
<p>She could see it. She knew enough about Maxwell, and knew enough hard details from her personnel file, to know what story Maxwell was expecting her to imagine. And it was a striking image: a young teenager, alone under the stars on a hillside or a forest clearing. In her mind's eye, the girl sat with her Frankenstein'd radio cradled in her lap, flashlight clutched in one hand, looking up at the sky for a sign that someone from another world would come for her. That something, anything else was out there.</p>
<p>"But then let me guess," said Rachel, because she knew how the story was expected to end, "your parents noticed you weren't in bed and used your foolproof plan against you to track you down."</p>
<p>"Oh yeah, sent the local police department out after me and everything. My dad was <em>not</em> happy with me." Again, Maxwell's smile went flat, the kind of thing Rachel recognized from Mr. Cutter as meaning "and further elaboration is not important, so drop it if you know what's good for you".</p>
<p>Rachel held her ground 'til Maxwell decided she'd passed the test. "Nah, not really," she admitted. "I stayed out all night. And when nothing came to pick me up, I snuck back in while it was still dark. See, the funny thing about being stuck in a backwards little town with nothing to do? It's a great way to train escape artists."</p>
<p>"And I bet the smart ones even make it to the real world eventually."</p>
<p>"Mm, I’d say it’s less a matter of brains and more of imagination. You gotta be able to look around and say ‘screw this, there’s gotta be something better out there’. And there’s nothing better for the imagination than the mountain skies on a dark, quiet night."</p>
<p>Maxwell paused to let the effect sink in, giving her full attention back to the observation deck window and the tiny corner of the night sky the station was, impossibly, still flying in. It felt like nighttime, too; the lights low, with any of their fellow reanimated corpses far enough away that it was as quiet as the <em>Hephaestus</em> ever got.</p>
<p>"I guess it's no wonder my home state has the second highest rate of UFO sightings in the country..." Maxwell added to herself, then did an abrupt pivot and asked, "so how about you?"</p>
<p>Rachel blinked, even as her brain automatically switched gears now that Maxwell’s attention was on her. "...what?"</p>
<p>Maxwell gestured between the two of them. "Well, we've both gone and gotten 'abducted' by aliens now. So, was that your plan all along, or did you even want to go to space when you got into this?"</p>
<p>Her mind began to pull at pieces, trying to form a picture of just what it was Maxwell was after here. What her angle was, what game she was playing now. If she expected Rachel to be so taken in by how utterly insignificant human lives were in the grand scheme of the cosmos that suddenly all her plans felt inconsequential. And for the first day or two of… all of this, they sort of had, while the cobbled-together nerd squad tried to walk Bob the resident Space Jesus through the more confusing aspects of human physicality. But Rachel had seen the Dear Listeners’ emissary get his neck snapped by her former boss. By the time she found a chance to kick Kepler out of an airlock again, she was over it (she’d spaced him three times in the past week, it really never got old).</p>
<p>Just because they were well beyond the edges of Cutter’s road map didn’t mean they were done, after all. Coming back from the dead just meant another chance to play.</p>
<p>"...I guess you could say I'm a little like you." Rachel said at last, watching the star churn with shades of red and orange, arcing long tongues of plasma out into the dark. “Couldn’t stand being stuck somewhere pointless.”</p>
<p>Sure, the real story was that she’d clawed her way into doing business with the most powerful man in the world, but there were worse businesses to be in than space.</p>
<p>"And I suppose I'm not going to get the real story out of you,” Maxwell said.</p>
<p>Rachel gave her a wry smile. "What, like wanting to change the world isn't enough?" </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>So yeah, Chapter 3 is <i>technically</i> an AU, but only about as AU as a basically-compliant post-canon AU ever can be. I wanted to leave the "surprise! they're on the Hephaestus!" unspoiled, otherwise I would've added "Alien Zombie Maxwell" to the tags, because "Alien Zombie Maxwell" is just such a delightful phrase. So, enjoy your first glimpse at my post-canon concepts. They'll be back... eventually. I have to go finish my W359/Spider-Verse crossover fanart first. p: </p>
<p>But in the meantime, if you'd like to have me ramble about it at you, feel free to drop by the <a href="https://discord.gg/64FKbX6">#Wolf-359 channel in the Podcast Girls Week Discord server,</a> because god knows I will if someone asks, haha.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Note: because I am a pedant and because I've done too much reading over the past couple weeks to not mention it: yes, "OPR" stands for "officer performance report", so yes, "OPR report" is redundant the same way "ATM machine" is, but it flowed better when phrased that way. Bite me.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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